New and improved Pete's Greens

New $800,000 barn will help increase production and improve working conditions at popular CSA in Craftsbury

Oct. 21, 2011

Pete Johnson, owner of Pete's Greens in Craftsbury, tours the new barn that is under construction on Oct. 12, 2011. The produce farm is rebuilding after it suffered a barn fire in January. / EMILY McMANAMY, Free Press

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CRAFTSBURY — A couple of developments are conspiring to slow final phases of construction of the 16,000-square-foot barn at Pete’s Greens, a structure that replaces the old wooden dairy barn that burned down at the Craftsbury farm in January.

“We’re out of money,” said Pete Johnson, owner of the Northeast Kingdom organic produce farm.

The other factor: The builder in charge of the project, Isaac Jacobs, and his wife, Melissa, are expecting their first child any minute. Eighty hour work weeks in the summer mean the birth of a baby will be a vacation for Jacobs.

“I’m finally starting to feel comfortable,” Jacobs said last week. “The bulk of it is done, and that feels great.”

Pete’s Greens is a large vegetable grower in the Northeast Kingdom, with wholesale and retail markets. The farm produces about 75 varieties of vegetables a year. It operates a CSA (community supported agriculture) program in which members pay in advance for a weekly share of food. (I’m a member of the CSA.)

The barn that burned was by the road, across the barnyard from the farmhouse and farmstand. The new structure is several hundred yards from the road, by fields that are part of the farm’s 50 cultivated acres.

Its south side faces a beautiful, flat field where greens and potatoes grow, and the not-so-distant hills remind you this is northern Vermont. Outside the barn under a roof, pallets of onions — a portion of the four-acre crop — dry in the wind and sun before storage.

Nearby greenhouses will produce greens year-round, expanding by a few months the past production schedule. The greens, previously available mostly to CSA members, will be sold to restaurants and stores this winter, Johnson said.

It’s an expanding market, one recognized by Vern Grubinger, vegetable and berry specialist with University of Vermont Extension.

“It’s the flip side of the fresh produce localvore movement,” Grubinger said. “There’s a lot of inadvertent market pressure to stretch the season. People are eating it in season, typically they’re going to continue eating it. It just hasn’t been from here. It’s exciting with some of the winter production. Growers are finding ways to grow crops without using a lot of fuel.”

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Fancy doors, steel beams

Jacobs, 34, spent last Wednesday morning moving vegetables around the cooler. It was the first time in a while he had his hands on the food and it felt great, Jacobs said.

He stood on a ladder as he spoke, working on a high-speed door that separates the main barn from the cooler. The door moves at about 100 feet a second, and automatically disengages from its track if it gets banged into.

“In the blink of an eye, it’s open,” Jacobs said. “It’s all about sealing the air in there. We put a lot of effort into making this a really tight, well insulated space.”

Jacobs’ efforts range from installing high-tech doors to cutting 40-foot steel beams (and moving them with a loaner crane) to building double-framed, 20-by-24 foot wall panels — part of the construction that took “forever,” he said.

“I think I almost hit four months without a day off,” he said. “It’s tremendous stress to build a building this big, this fast.”

The building, to replace the one destroyed in a fire — a blaze that also wrecked equipment and about $250,000 worth of food — is the largest new facility for vegetable production and processing in Vermont, according to Grubinger.

There are large dairy barns that have been converted for vegetable growing, including Paul Harlow’s in Westminster, Grubinger said.

“Pete’s looks to be the biggest,” he said. “The more produce you move, the more you do something with it, like put it in bags, the more space you need.”

At the peak of construction, about 10 men were working on the building, Johnson said. The core of the crew, including Jacobs, are farm employees. Johnson worked on the building until May, when he turned his attention to farming.

The construction project puts Pete’s Greens $625,000 in debt, and has cost about $825,000, according to Johnson and financial manager Amy Skelton. Johnson is committed to carrying that level of debt, and will complete final phases of the project as finances allow, he said. When work on the coolers is complete in a month, construction will come to a temporary end, Skelton said.

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Prior to the fire, his business had no debt, Johnson said.

“That’s the good thing,” he said. “None of this has been scary or emotionally difficult. I think it would’ve been if that (prior debt) were the case. We have very passionate people who work here and I still love it. We’re excited about the future. People do crazier things all the time.”

'Healthier building'

Grubinger said there is a “long continuum” of vegetable growers in the state, from small producers with no assets to borrow against to bigger growers who borrow money to make money.

“A lot of it is knowing what your goals are,” he said. “When you have strong markets and good management skills and a good land resource — soil and water — doing what Pete’s doing makes sense.”

The barn has storage space for crops and supplies such as boxes, canning jars and labels. “It’s amazing how much crap it takes to run a business like this,” Johnson said.

There’s a 56-by-56 foot cooler, 26 feet tall for stacking big bins of storage crops; a freezer with 32-inch thick insulated walls with space for others producers to rent; and a kitchen for producing so-called value-added products like roasted chili peppers and watermelon juice — a product that came about when Pete’s Greens extracted the seeds from melons. The seeds are for High Mowing Organic Seeds in Wolcott; the juice stayed on the farm and will go to CSA members.

The structure will house the farm’s offices, showers and a lunchroom for employees.

“Happily, it’s where we thought it was going to be,” he said. “We’re further ahead in construction than we thought. ... We’ll peck away at the rest of it. We lost a lot of other equipment, stuff that we’re still having to replace. The only profitability in New England vegetable farming is scrounging. There are masters in Vermont. Most of us don’t buy new stuff too much.”

Though farm food is what Johnson missed most in the months after the fire, he talks first about people — and the advantages of the new structure for employees — when he describes the new facility.

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“It’s a much healthier building to work in,” Johnson said. “That, to me, going forward, is a really good thing. We just didn’t have the guts or wherewithal to build this without being forced to.”

The building is tall enough to steer a fork lift, the vehicle carrying loads previously shouldered by workers. People will be able to change out of wet clothes, and have a warm and comfortable place to take a break. With the office in the same place as produce washing and storage, communication among various aspects of the farm will work better, Johnson said.

“This work is pretty hard. It’s dirty, wet, it’s not glamorous. We get people who are into it, into the produce. But if they’re really uncomfortable all the time, that’s no good,” he said. “They’re the final eyeball on the produce. It’s important that they’re focused and happy.”

Jacobs remembers the phone call he got at 4:30 in the morning last January, telling him about the fire. He went into “panic mode,” threw on his clothes and drove to the farm. “It’s gonna stick with me for a long time,” he said.

The fire destroyed the barn and an addition Jacobs was building.

“As soon as the barn burned down we started brainstorming,” he said. “We jumped right into what comes next.”